Law & Disorder —

Meanwhile, husband Charles pens angry poems defending his mom.

A world turned upside down

The Carreon view of Inman

The Carreons largely seem baffled about how they entered this crazy, upside-down world. All Carreon did with his initial letter was what any lawyer might; the harm here, the real bad behavior—couldn't everyone see that it was being driven by Inman?

Matt Inman is a sadist, a cyberbully, a liar, and an Internet terrorist. Here, HE DID THE BAD THING.

Put aside the rightness or wrongness of any particular party here for a moment and try to imagine how this would feel. We've all been in situations where we suddenly look around a room in shock and disbelief as people look at us with loathing—when we know it's exactly the opposite! The sense of a world gone off the rails is bewildering. It's infuriating. Tara Carreon actually sums up the feeling well:

I mean, it's so fucking absurd. Every moral virtue that is rightly on our side, they claim for themselves. This is truly the Devil reciting scripture.

From the Carreons' perspective, this whole controversy exploded out of thin air—Carreon demonized after a lifetime of service to the good and the just, by a bunch of anonymous Internet trolls and commenters.

These little cannibal kids think they're so brave, standing up for the sadist Matt Inman, tearing a good lawyer's name apart, a lawyer who is practically a saint, who has worked for the underprivileged and poor his whole adult life, while they post anonymously. If they're so brave, then why don't they post under their real names, and give us the opportunity to tear their names apart? Put up hate sites using their names? Because in this new fascist "Internet" world we live in, the anonymous people deserve free speech, while those with names, deserve to have their identities destroyed. That is so American—not!

This could have been the start of a worthwhile post on the nature of Internet anonymity and bad behavior, a topic certainly deserving of thoughtful writing and analysis. Unfortunately, when the world looks upside-down and you're trying single-handedly to right it, situations look extreme and so extreme comparisons get made.

Like I said, they are our modern-day "Hitler youth," and Matt Inman is their Hitler—not even the person Hitler, just "Hitler's port-a-potty." [A term Inman used in an interview to describe his Twitter feed.] And they're proud of it. They think it's funny. They think they can take any racist, bigoted, regressive idea and legitimize it by putting it into a cartoon.

In case you didn't get the message, it appears again later: "Matt Inman seems to be the de facto leader of the modern American Hitler Youth," Tara wrote. Also, she suspects he hates women and is a "terrible misogynist."

The question, in Tara's mind, comes down to just how much bad behavior one has to accept on the Internet. Certainly, the Internet feels like something different from the regular world in Tucson. Stir up enemies at home and you're unlikely to be called names by more than a few people at once; stir up a fight online and you might be attacked at once by thousands, if not millions—and in the most offensive possible terms. And people keep suggesting that the Carreons just sit back and let the tidal wave crash into them.

"The KKK is coming at you," Tara writes, "and instead of fighting back, you are advised to just take it. That's what Matt Inman's bunch wants us to do."

Painful as it might be, sometimes there's real wisdom in just walking away from a fight, even with hateful names ringing out in the air behind you. Because it's hard to see how trying to out-name-call the Internet, even just to prove a point, is going to help the situation. But Tara gives it a pretty good shot.

These phaggotish, conspiratorial, childish, dorkish, baseless, mindless, shameful, dumb, aggressive, jealous, reprobate, obsessed, mad, clueless, shockingly delusional, completely lost and in trouble, bottom-of-the-barrel, short-sighted, dumb-fuck, ranting, Un-American, contemptible, obnoxious, embarrassing, incompetent, bizarre, constipated, bankrupt, hypocritical, stupid, fearful, carnivorous, wolverine, ranting, foaming at the mouth, bullying, lying, paranoid, no-better-than-the-mafia, smeghead, scumbag, cretinous, lazy, delusional, demented, narcissistic, pathological, extortionistic lunatic, thuggish drama-whores, poised on the edge of a precipice, hoisted by their own petard, their holy fucking shitballs burning inside a biplane careening toward the Statue of Liberty, rhinos raping chinchillas dressed up in unicorns' undergarments, who deserve every bad thing that happens to them, having to learn their lessons the hard way, and who I wouldn't even piss on if they were on fire (they believe in name-calling at TechDirt) claim that these types of statements are not actionable because they aren't "false facts," just "satire." Where is the dividing line?

"We're going to have to sue them all"

The Carreons have been in this situation before. "It's not the first time we've been targeted as sacrificial victims," Tara wrote. "We were targeted by the entire Buddhist community when I told them to go fuck themselves, for being nihilists, elitists, and authoritarians."

As for what comes next, it's clear that Charles Carreon's lawsuit isn't going away. This week, he expanded on his initial complaint. Tara warns that the scope of the lawsuit will be broadened as Carreon unearths new names of those who have impersonated him online.

And we're going to have to sue them all. There are a lot of people just dying to be sued on this one. If you don't have a lawyer in the family, I would recommend you start getting concerned about this now. For yourself, friends, loved-ones, and fellow-citizens. This is a lynching on the Internet frontier.

What's remarkable about the entire case is just how clearly it's driven by personal animus. A certain form of Internet culture—think 4chan's /b/ or much of Anonymous or The Oatmeal—has elevated crass speech and thought into a positive virtue. Names get called, words get said, and topics once unmentionable in "polite company" have become everyday memes—and no one's supposed to get bent out of shape about it. This is just the way we talk now.

But words sting as much as they always did offline, and the anonymous speech of the Internet means that they can suddenly pour forth in an overwhelming torrent. When directed at individuals, especially those who don't accept the speech conventions of these communities and don't consider their "humor" to be funny so much as offensive, people get angry.

Plenty of people are angry here. FunnyJunk's mysterious backers, upset when Inman got into a war of words and pictures with them in 2011, were angry enough to hire a lawyer to go after him almost a year later. Inman was furious about the request that he, the one whose cartoons were being reproduced without attribution on sites like FunnyJunk, be asked to pay $20,000, and he responded with memorable bile to Carreon. Now Carreon and family feel like victims in their turn. Where Inman turned his anger into pictures and a $200,000 fundraising drive, Carreon has turned his into law. As he put it in verse:

So get behind me, Satan!
You're just a bit of roadkill,
Like the thief of Sex.Com,
Just another fool,
Who thought he was the bomb.
Next time, Mr. Inman,
Don't talk about my Mom.

Promoted Comments

My view: here's the problem - Charles and Tara Carreon are trying, quite unsuccessfully, to play the innocent victim and aren't able to back away from their emotional investment in this.

This all started off not so innocently enough. FunnyJunk's business model is well into the shady side of the spectrum. They know it, their viewers know it, and everyone that looks at the site knows it. They may or may not be on the right legal side of the law, but it is fairly obvious that they have no qualms walking the line on the moral obligations to protect third party creators, in the same way that YouTube was willing to play as dumb as legally feasible while they were initially building their business (before Google bought them out). Think Megaupload; they had a lot of good reason to suspect that there was a lot of illicit business involved in the background of their site (and emails show that they might have known about specific cases and not done anything about them). That is not to say that they were necessarily crossing the legal threshold to be liable (that particular battle is going to be in the courts for many years, and will ultimately determine the legal standing of similar sites in a way that YouTube didn't), just that there was a good deal of hedging on the moral grounds the site was using.

Oatmeal called them out on his blog. No matter what side you are on, he was entitled to and well within his rights to speak his mind about the subject. He could arguably have taken it much further. He could have hired a high school kid to spend several hours a day finding links and cutting and pasting them into DCMA notices on his behalf to send, or (considering the allegation that FJ didn't have a DCMA agent and was potentially not entitled to Safe Harbor protections) potentially sued them and taken down the site. From the money that Inman supposedly has access to, he certainly had the resources to put a lawyer on it and make an issue of it, whether he won or lost. He just wrote the blog post and left it at that, and considering the money he potentially left on the table by not making an issue of it, I think that he took the moral high ground. That is the sentiment that I seemed to see from most that covered the story last year, including some hardcore anti-copyright and anti-DCMA sites, writers, and blogs.

When Carreon wrote that letter, it was lawyering in the common (but still base) level that lawyers do. A lot of what lawyers do is the distasteful stuff, and I can't blame him for doing as his client asked and trying to quash the blog post. It's not a nice thing, but sometimes in business not-nice things have to be done, and life goes on. I do think that FJ was definitely wrong for apparently misleading Carreon with some of the things alleged (assuming that is what happened). I also think that Carreon didn't do all of his due diligence (he obviously did some, including immediately getting himself registered as a DCMA agent), or intentionally ignored some of what he found. A basic perusal of the site would have shown current incidents of Oatmeal's images on the site, as well as potential infringements involving other artists. The decision to send the first email without that due diligence (or making sure FJ's nose was at least currently clean), was made in arrogance. Either he didn't care enough to look or he decided it he could bully Inman to the point where it didn't matter. Either way, it was low-brow lawyering tactics (including wording it so that it is a threat, but not a commitment to file a lawsuit which the lawyer has reasonable expectation would be thrown out as merit-less) which are the epitome of why lawyers have such a bad stereotype. Life goes on, it isn't anything that we don't expect from lawyers in this society at this point.

Inman standing up for himself, and in such a confrontational way, was undoubtedly not expected. Honestly, it was probably the wrong move on Inman's part, since the original mail was probably an intimidation threat without any backing, and if a lawyer for Inman had called Carreon on his bluff this probably would have gone quietly away. I understand Inman's thought process, though, and can understand why having to pay a lawyer to get involved in such a thing that was so obviously abusive of the legal system would be...distasteful. At the end of the day, though it was probably the incorrect tactical move, I can understand why he did what he did. The drawing probably didn't help.

The problem was that Carreon's skin was suddenly publicly in the game and if he backed down then he would publicly lose face. Any future legal threat letters he ever sent out would suddenly acquire another barrier to being successful, since a simple Google search for Carreon's name would show to anyone that potentially receives such a letter that the threat Carreon submitted may be legally merit-less and can potentially be successfully fought with a shame campaign. At that point, Carreon, for the sake of his name, probably decided that he couldn't back down. I would love to know the discussion that Carreon had with FJ at this point, because it is obvious that FJ refused to get involved in the actual litigation (despite the entire lawsuit being based on the original complaint of theirs), and I can't imagine that Carreon didn't want the additional basis for the lawsuit.

Carreon's mistake here was not doing one of the following: if he truly believed he was defamed then quietly file a lawsuit, and when asked by anyone just say that there was pending litigation that he couldn't discuss; or he could just play it off as a misunderstanding of the facts, donate to the cause, make an apology and make himself out to be the misunderstood guy that made a mistake. Frankly, given the facts, the latter (though hurtful to the pride), would probably have relegated all of this to a slow news day or even given him credit for taking responsibility. Taking the attack and vociferously charging, lawsuit in hand, and especially given the inconsistency of his arguments, couldn't have been designed to make him look like more of a bad guy. Frankly, the internet loves the little guy, and everyone on it fears to have their anonymity taken away, and everyone really hates the idea of lawsuits being thrown around to that effect.

Everything that the internet did at this point could be easily predicted. They looked into his past, they publicized every petty little detail they could find, and they pulled every petty little prank that they could do.

Really, Carrreon's stance on this whole thing has been reprehensible. Even the first email was a strike against free speech, even if it was in the form of a baseless threat letter. I, and most people on the internet, have a huge issue with the removal of free speech. Really, that was what all the fuss about ACTA/SOPA/PIPA was about; a large portion (probably a majority) of people couldn't care less about torrents and copyrights and the lot, one way or another. Instead, it was really about the removal of freedoms, and particularly the ways in which the poorly written laws could be used to curtail free speech (for instance, intentionally posting links on someone's blog and then getting the site taken down on that basis, without any need for due process) that most people were really rejecting.

As Evelyn Hall put it in describing Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This sentiment is what the freedom of expression is all about, and at the end of the day is the basis of the entirety of western society. A lawyer spitting at it in this way and trying to quash people's right to speak freely is beyond distasteful, it is poison and toxic to the ideas of law in western style civilization. For a self-proclaimed First Amendment crusading lawyer (which up to this point many First Amendment crusaders pointed at as such) to do this makes in spiritual treason.

Honestly, Carreon is probably committed to the lawsuit at this point. At this point, he should probably shutup and stop himself from doing himself from doing more harm. Let the case stand on its own merits (which, from the analysis I've seen probably doesn't bode well for said lawsuit), and stop giving the news cycle more ammunition to keep the story going. The denizens of the internet have constantly shown a short attention span, so if he doesn't feed the fire it will fade away fairly quickly. There isn't any way (even if he somehow managed to win the lawsuit) to come out of this smelling like roses or looking like the good guy here, the only thing he can really do is mitigate how bad he looks.